Friday, October 06, 2017

David Brooks Is Learning: Guns as Identity

The real reason the gun rights side is winning is postindustrialization. The gun issue has become an epiphenomenon of a much larger conflict over values and identity.
A century ago, the forces of industrialization swept over agricultural America, and monetary policy became the proxy fight in that larger conflict. Today, people in agricultural and industrial America legitimately feel that their way of life is being threatened by postindustrial society. The members of this resistance have seized on issues like guns, immigration, the flag as places to mobilize their counterassault. Guns are a proxy for larger issues.

Four in 10 American households own guns. As Hahrie Han, a political science professor, noted in The Times Wednesday, there are more gun clubs and gun shops in this country than McDonald’s. For many people, the gun is a way to protect against crime. But it is also an identity marker. It stands for freedom, self-reliance and the ability to control your own destiny. Gun rights are about living in a country where families are tough enough and responsible enough to stand up for themselves in a dangerous world.

Brooks' solution is a "new synthesis," which is all well and good if you think it's possible to keep the USA united. Although he thinks of it in terms of rednecks and hipsters, aka America 1980. Guns are becoming a proxy for white and white-presenting identity against a non-white America that mostly opposes it. The hipsters seeks the destruction of rednecks via immigration.

He's absolutely correct in describing guns and gun rights as an identity issue. Leftists would do well to consider guns as the right's gay issue. It's socially acceptable to call for reversing gun rights, whereas the Right can only try to stop the advance of gay/trans "rights," but legislatively the Left's anti-gun rhetoric results in even stronger pro-gun legislation because it's one area where the Right will counter-attack. Cuck Ryan shelved H.R.367 - Hearing Protection Act of 2017 ( bill that will eliminate a federal tax on suppressors) after the Las Vegas shooting, The odds of it eventually passing have gone up though.